WS02 Brings Middleware to the Cloud

Middleware servers used to be locked down to on-premise deployments, but that has now changed in the modern world of the cloud and Platform-as-a-Service.
Open source Stratos 1.5 platform delivers Complex Event Processing as a service.

Middleware vendor WS02 is advancing its PaaS offering this week with the release of Stratos 1.5. Statros is an open source project that is also available as service from WSO2 with Stratos Live, which is hosted on Amazon's EC2.

As opposed to simply putting a WS02 Carbon server on Amazon, Stratos provides cloud features that are required for service delivery.

"We do have cloud images of Carbon that can be used in a public cloud that support elasticity," Paul Fremantle, WSO2 co-founder and CTO, told InternetNews.com. "But what they don't support is the real cloud native features like multi-tenancy, metering and enabling is self service."

The Stratos 1.5 release builds on the latest WSO2 Carbon framework release, which was released at the end of June. One of the key new features in the Carbon release was the inclusion of a Complex Event Processing (CEP) capability that is now being brought to Stratos as a cloud service. CEP enables users and developers to identify patterns and trends in blocks of data.

Stratos 1.5 also provides new options for users with a Data as a Service model that uses both the MySQL database as well as the NoSQL Cassandra database.

"It's a complete self contained environment for doing data as a service," Freemantle said. "SQL isn't always the first choice for integration apps, we've been following Cassandra and we've added support for it in a multi-tenant model."

Cassandara was originally created by Facebook and was donated to Apache to become an open source project. Freemantle noted that Cassandra can dynamically scale up and down while maintaining consistent performance and it fits the cloud model really well.

From a management perspective, WSO2 has something called the database explorer. Once a user has provisioned his virtual database, the database explorer is available as a web console for managing the database.

Freemantle added that another key feature of the Stratos 1.5 release is the ability to built what his company is calling, 'Software-as-a-Service Web Apps'.

"This is the ability we've added to Stratos to take a web app and allow it to be deployed in such a way that all the tenant identities are acceptable," Freemantle said.

He explained that for example if a developer put a web app in his own StratosLive instance, what used to happen was the app would be available for only tenants of the host instance. In Statos 1.5, there is now a multitenant identity manager to enable enterprises that want to build SaaS apps.